Monday, 8 August 2016

OTNTourLA 2016 - Mexico

One of the problems of travelling with Tim Hall (there are many more) is that he always gets his blog out first, and I have to struggle to write something different. Tim described the event as a mini Oracle Open World, and that is exactly how it looked, all red and white with a central marquee that was surrounded by the breakout rooms and the main hall. A partner CertficaTIC had an Oracle Penguin walking around the event and at the end of the day gave away with the user group several training and certification packages for Oracle certification; an amazing initiative.The event kicked off with the OraMex team talking about how they had grown, and to me the is the true value of these OTN Tours. It supports local user groups, brings them top speakers they wouldn't normally have locally, and encourages them to grow local talent. Many of the local region speakers on these tours would count themselves as part of this success.After their talk, Pablo did his bit telling the OTN story and then Tim was keynote. Quite funny as I don't think he was expecting it, but he did a great job and had the audience engaged, despite the language difference. This made it so much easier for all the sessions going forward as we knew the delegates (300+) were up for a great day.OraMex did not make the mistake of having too many sessions and that meant everyone had really good numbers for all their sessions. I was in the Cloud track, and had two sessions. The first was to be 'Upgrading to Cloud from EBS' but although my room was full, standing room only, only 2 people were Oracle Apps users. About half were students and most of the rest were people in the first stages of their career. So I changed the content, easier for me to do than some of the more technical presenters; as my sessions are more story telling and thought provoking (I hope). I talked about why Cloud Applications and then how in my role within Certus, spend time with customers understanding how to get the most from them, how to approach a migration and all the things you need to consider, data archiving, migrating, integrations, user adoption etc. I used Oracle and our customers as examples, and hopefully what they heard is relevant to what a career in this area is all about.Afterwards Pablo who was taking photos as my session was closing, told me he had heard lots of really positive feedback about my session; that made me feel great.

Although it was a big event, I only had two sessions here, because there were a lot of ACE Directors at this event and as I already said a lot of fantastic local talent. My second session was my Digital Disruption session and again very easy to make it so relevant to the again packed audience. I was on such a high; I really wanted to do the PaaS session as well as the room next door was dedication to Fusion Middleware.There was a great networking session after the event, which most people stayed to. It was really rewarding to talk to the delegates that had spent the day there and understand what they got from the day.

Most of the speakers - photo from OTN

Then it was off to a speakers' dinner, traditional Mexican food in La Destileria in the Reforma District, where all our hotels were, although traffic meant a long trip.

Photo thanks to OTN

The dinner was lovely and again the chance to speak to local user group leaders and speakers and I really want to thank Rolando Carrasco, Rene Antunez and Plinio Arbizu for their great event and hospitality.

The next day was saturday and Rene hired a car big enough for Tim Hall, Tim Gorman and Kellyn, Kuassi, Kamren and I and took us to the Teotihuacan pyramids. I went two years ago and loved it. So to go again was a real privilege and again I managed to get to the top (just). Last time I needed Hans to help me, this imd I had a nordic walking stick!Then we finished the day with a lovely meal. I can't thank Rene enough for his hospitality.